NY Times Celebrates Brooklyn Neighborhood Watch Group

I understand you probably don't live in NY, but Brooklyn isn't the monolithic entity I suspect some people on here think. That story is about East New York. East New York has as much relation to Park Slope, for example, as a penguin does to a mule. The crime rate has dropped dramatically in East New York over the last several decades (starting back around Giuliani), but there aren't too many people -- NY Times readers or otherwise -- who think of East New York as an up-and-coming neighborhood.

My dad was a school principal in that neighborhood for a few decades, including the 1970s, when it was at its worst. It was rough. More than a hundred murders a year rough. Leading the city in crime statistics rough (it still does -- stray bullets whizzing around that area are still a common occurrence, even with the reduction in crime that has been a citywide phenomenon).

It's gotten safer, but what place hasn't? It doesn't mean it's part of the Brooklyn you are thinking, though, or that anyone thinks of East New York in terms of real estate values. It may as well be another planet if you live in Cobble Hill. In fact, I'd guess a lot of the Brooklyn you are thinking about couldn't place East New York on a map. If they can, they think of the neighborhood in terms of crime statistics -- crime statistics that few places in this country would be able to relate to (it's not Chicago bad anymore, but what place is?).

As for the original post, East New York isn't a paradigm for anything anyone on here knows. "Man Up!" is not a new program. And it doesn't relate to a "neighborhood watch" program most of you would understand, unless you live in a neighborhood filled with housing projects, dire poverty, drugs, violence and kids who can't walk to and from school safely.

"Man Up!" may or may not have done good things for East New York. There are a dozen other programs like it that can make the same kind of claims. Before that story, though, the only things I had ever read about it were things questioning its finances and the relationship between hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars filtered to it through a relationship between its executive director and two of the sleaziest politicians in NYC; the infamous Charles Barron -- the city council member with a penchant for saying anti-semitic things)and his wife Inez, a NY state assemblywoman. The guy who started Man Up used to be an aide to them, and now the group swims in money supposedly, and there have been allegations of financial impropriety and kickbacks -- at taxpayer expense. I have no idea if any of it is true. But it's made news. I also have no idea if Man Up! is solely, or partially, responsible for any decrease in murder. But it was an interesting read. If they get one kid out of a gang, great. I just hope it isn't getting piddling results at huge taxpayer expenses, while a few corrupt people enrich themselves and use any marginal successes (that may not even have to do with what they are doing) to justify their existence. There have been way too many of those types of programs that have come through East New York in the last 50 years, and the only constant has been that it has remained one of the worst neighborhoods in New York.